>>I'm Peg Clifton from the Science, Technology and Business Division. Welcome to our presentation today. This is the last of four that we've had this year in our ongoing collaboration with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This year we've learned about the polls, honeybees, urban sprawl and today about wild fires. Next year we expect to bring you another four or five exciting programs on remote sensing of earths systems. You can find information on those and all of our other programs on the science reference services web page. I would personally like to thank all of the Goddard scientists and engineers that have joined us, as well as our liaison from Goddard, Jeanie Alan, wherever she is. And the other terrific people here and there who have helped us bring you these programs. I'm gonna just skip to your bio. You can tell us about fire. Our presenter today, Doctor Compton J Tucker [phonetic] is a native of Carlsbad, New Mexico. He received his MS in 1973 and PHD in 1975 from Colorado State University, both from the college of forestry. During his graduate years he was associated with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory of the US International Biological Programs Grassland Biome. In late 1975 he came to NASA Goddard as a National Academy of Scientists Post Doctoral Fellow and in 1977 became an employee of NASA. From 1975 to 1980 he concentrated on data collection and analysis using spectrometer data and handheld radiometers. Since 1980 he has used Noah and Landsat Satellite Data for studying deforestation, habitat fragmentation, desert boundary determination, ecologically decoupled diseases, terrestrial primary production and how climate affects global vegetation. He has authored or coauthored more than 140 journal articles. He's an adjunct professor in the geography department at the University of Maryland and has been awarded several metals and honors including the National Air and Space Museum Trophy for current achievement. He is currently a senior staff scientist at the NASA Goddard Flight Center and for the past two years has been on a NASA sponsored detail to the US Climate Change Science Program Office. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Tucker. [applause] Thank you.
>>Thanks. [laughter] Well then I'll stand right here as directed. Anyway, so the first image is this very spectacular image which most of us have seen from the National Geographic of these two elk or deer in Yellowstone River or Firehole River in 1988 with the massive wildfires in Yellowstone National Park. And fire is a natural component of our ecosystems and is extremely important. So as a general outline of my presentation, I'll spend a little bit of time but not much, talking about what are the physical principles for how we can observe fire, from space, from aircraft. Why is fire important? It's extremely important for many reasons including global climate change because the combustion of wildfires, especially in forests, results in a large flux of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which exacerbates the C02 concentration in the atmosphere, which is then important because of the climatic forcing. I'll show an example of that. Then I'll spend most of my time talking about some recent examples of fire and especially from Greece just a few weeks ago, as well as other examples in areas where there is a Mediterranean ecosystem like we have in California. And then lastly I'll review how these data are being used by the US Forest Service to actually mitigate the damage from fires. Okay so very briefly I'll go through some of the physics behind this that all objects radiate energy as a function of their temperature. Our sun, for example, is very hot. It has a certain energy distribution and that obeys this lower formula, which is circled right here, which is the black body radiation curve. And then above is also circled a very convenient formula that depending upon the temperature of objects you can determine at what wavelength in the spectrum, in the electromagnetic spectrum, the peak emission from that temperature results. So that is extremely important if you want to observe people, fires, the earth, the oceans, whatever. Now here in this slide are several lines which correspond to different black body radiation curves for objects which are perfect emitters of varying temperatures. Now these are in units of Kelvin, which you take disintegrate temperature and you add 273 to it and you have the Kelvin temperature. And so zero Kelvin is absolute zero, thanks, [laughter] and I was going to point to the various curves but
>>You can use the mouse to do that.
>>Oh cool. Okay so where I am right now is the peak of our suns spectral emission of energy, the electromagnetic spectrum. It goes all the way from x-rays, ultraviolet through the visible into the infrared and then to longer wavelengths. But what is really important is if we look at the peak of the energy output from the sun, it is about .5 micrometers. And this is undoubtedly why we see in the visible spectrum. This is where the most inner view from our sun is. If we had a sun of a different temperature, say 300 kelvin or 3,500 kelvin, then we would have some type of infrared vision. So this is a prime example of the evolution of visual systems to take advantage of where there's the maximum energy. We will do the same thing if we want to study fires, we will hone our measurement tools to those wavelengths where fire has its strongest emission as a function of its temperature. Now this figure on the left hand side are two lines. One is the solar radiation from our sun at the top of the atmosphere and that is kind of stifled and then the white area below it is that portion of the suns emission of electromagnetic radiation that actually reaches sea level on the earth. And so what you see is that our atmosphere is very transparent to radiation in the visible region of the spectrum. It's fortunate that ozone and other gases are however strong absorbers of ultraviolet radiation because that is potentially ionizing radiation and would give most of us skin cancer or worse. And then as we go out to longer wavelengths in the infrared region of the spectrum we see there are some areas where the energy from the sun at those are wavelengths, say for example right in here at 1.4 micrometers or around 1.9 micrometers, the energy at those wavelengths is completely absorbed by our atmosphere, therefore it's impossible to make measurements from space because you can't see through the atmosphere. It is completely opaque. And then if we look at longer wavelengths out in this region as well as here, the absorption in the atmosphere is caused by water vapor and atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is the basis for the greenhouse effect. The energy comes in from the sun at shorter wavelengths and warms the earth. It is readmitted at longer wavelengths where it is absorbed to a very high degree by our atmosphere and by trace gases and water vapor in the atmosphere. So on the right hand side of this figure at the top is the sun. This sort of band you see right here is the atmosphere as viewed from the space shuttle looking towards sunrise or sunset. And so this is this thin layer of the atmosphere in which we on the land live and which also protects us from ultraviolet radiation, cosmic rays, very energetic shorter wavelength energy. Then at the bottom right in here in the white areas where we have atmospheric windows where our atmosphere is transparent to radiation of these wavelengths and where you have these darker areas is where you have complete absorption by the atmosphere or else varying absorption as you see in other wavelengths. So one or two other things and then I'll get on and talk about the more interesting things in my presentation. Now if we look at the temperature of fires, let's say the temperature of fires usually is somewhere from 400 or 500 centigrade to 800 centigrade, something like that per most fires, most wildfires so if we look at the energy of maximum emission we go through the formula. We take 800 right here. We plug it into this simple formula and we see that the energy of maximum radiation from a fire of 800 degrees or 527 centigrade would be about 3.6 micrometers. And we look here and we see Walla there is an atmospheric window so we can measure that from space. That's really good. If we look at the temperature of the earth, let's say the mean temperature of the earth is somewhere on the order of 27 degrees centigrade, that's just a nice round number when you convert that to Kelvin. We see that the maximum radiation of the earth occurs around 10 micrometers where we also have a window. This is why we can study the temperature of earth and study fires from space because we can see through the atmosphere. Okay now what are some examples of using infrared energy to study features? Well on the nightly news we sometimes see police reports and we see helicopters flying around sometimes, well they have what are called forward looking infrared observing systems where they can actually look down an image, and these longer wavelengths by looking at the admitted radiation from the surface, from people, from animals, cars, all kinds of things and here are just some examples of them. So in the upper left are some people in a boat when they should be at work. [laughter] Or it could be at night and so they shouldn't be at work. And then you see a person on the upper right who's on top of a roof and because the roof is cold and the person is warmer, these are readily observed based upon this brief review of the radiation principle, which I just gave you, and then so on and so forth. And so here is some, I'm not sure if that's the police and they've subdued someone or it's some criminals perpetrating crime, on the middle left. On the middle right we see a ship and as we observe that with forwarding looking infrared radar, we note our, forward looking infrared radiation we notice that the smoke stack where the gases from the engine are coming out is much warmer. And in the bottom left the top of this storage facility is much warmer and then on the far right we see cars along the road and buildings. These are just some examples of how we can use infrared radiation and the information in it to study things, in this case, primarily for police work or for energy conservation. So now we come to the 1970's when we started launching earth observing satellites. We just had the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the start of the space age. Sputnik was the first artificial satellite. And now we have a wide range of different types of satellites to study the earth and this is called remote sensing. It's done remotely because we have instruments in space which look down at the earth. They're on satellites which go around in various types of orbits, usually some synchronis orbits or geostationary orbits, although not always, and they image the earth day in, day out, again and again. This is the basis for most of our climate information because we have to study large areas, we have to study them in time and see how things are changing. Okay so now I've gone through very briefly how we observe fires, now, why is fire important? Well it's extremely important in terms of ecology, in terms of land use, land cover change, hydrology, climate. Now for climate it's because of the flux of trace gases to the atmosphere. Think of forests, that trees grow for 100's of years sometimes, via photosynthesis they incorporate carbon dioxide into their leaves and especially into the wood so you have trees which sequester or store carbon over 100's of years. And then if they're cut down and burned you have a very rapid flux of that carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's why fires are very important for climate. There's also a threat to humans and that is more or less the focus of my presentation today, as well as animals and structures and natural and urban structures and I'll talk about some of the ways that we can mitigate those damages. So this is just an overview of several of the important components of fire in natural systems and in the human dominated portions of the planet. Now fires are global, I'll show some examples of that subsequently in just a few minutes or seconds, and they also occur in most vegetated zones of the earth. They don't in a cryosphere, where we have snow and ice, because it's too cold. But they do in forests, whether they're tropical forests, temperate forests, boreal forests, they also occur in savannah's. In fact, savannahs, which are areas where you have a mixture of either scattered trees or completely grass or some mixture of those two, they are highly seasonal and you have a rainy season, you have a dry season. And during the dry season they burn and especially the grass and herbaceous vegetation burns. The trees in most savannahs are very resistant to fire because they've evolved with fire. Now this is an image which we'll step through. It's been formed for the calendar year of 2006 [background noise] and by month. The month is identified at the bottom of the image as this steps through and every one kilometer by one kilometer point where there was a fire, is identified as being red. Now this doesn't mean that all of sub-Sahara Africa burned but just that a fraction of that burned. Now this is just to, because if you would actually represent the size of the fire in relation to the map, you couldn't see where the fires were. This simply shows you how, with the calendar year by month, you have fires in different places. So for example, as you come into July, August, and September you'll have a lot of fires at higher northern latitudes, so on and so forth. So this is one example of how satellite data over one year, where you have data from two satellites twice a day, from the modus instruments on aqua and on terra, two NASA platforms, you have data like this to study fires. Now you can also look at the inner annual variability of this for the months of April and May, going from 2001 through 2006 or from 2000 to 2006. And there's a lot of information like this on the web. If you're interested you can go and look but this is just to say that based upon climatic circumstances, if it's dryer and if it's hotter then you'll tend to have more fires. If it's wetter and cooler you will have less fires. So there's a strong role of climate in influencing where and when you have fires in natural systems. Now fire is extremely important for establishing the control or the dominance of different plant species globally. Without fire the extent of closed canopy forest would expand from about a quarter of our planet to about half. But because you have fire, fire tends to favor savannah grasses or herbaceous vegetation because it kills trees. And so in areas which would be prone to having forests expand, if you have a natural fire regime this then minimizes the expansion of forests. [background noise] What are some of the causes of fire? Well there are natural causes like, for example, lightening and volcanoes, of which lightening is by far the most important. But probably more than 90 percent of all of the fires on our planet are caused directly or indirectly by Homo sapiens, by us. And these can result from deportation from forest clearing. Then you have all of the byproducts of the forest clearing. The figure in the middle on the right is a photograph of Madagascar where you see a tropical forest has been cleared. Then you burn the vegetation because subsequent agricultural activities depend very, very highly on the resulting ash. And so when you have tropical deforestation you always have fire which is used then to render the woody vegetation into ash which is then important for two or three years of agriculture activity. This is the basis for slash and burn agriculture by indigenous people. But it's also important for a wide range of other circumstances and strongly among them, unfortunately, is arson and people setting fires. So I hope there aren't any pyromaniacs here today because they are not our friends. Okay so now let's look at some different photographs of different types of fires. Here at the top is the Yellowstone fire again and then at the bottom is an example of how people will set fires in savannah ecosystems. This will minimize the woody vegetation encroachment and that's extremely important if you are raising livestock. So in pastoral systems fire is used to promote herbaceous vegetation for the pastoralists. Now it's also used in agricultural settings, sugarcane is a very good example of that. After you have the cane harvest, then you burn your cane fields and this results in a tremendous flux of aerosols and trace gases of the atmosphere from that. Now associated with tropical deforestation, you also have the burning of the forest, of the woody material which is cut down. Here is a Landsat image from the Congo or probably a Modus image from Chris Justice's group at the University of Maryland and then all the places where there are fires are identified by these circles and the colors represent different years and they correspond very, very closely to where you have access to the forest. So this says are they natural or are they unnatural? They're all natural because you have to have access to start the fires and indeed several of us have used fires as a very convenient tool for surveying in tropical forests where you have human incursion. It's a very commonly used survey tool.
>>You said it was natural, did you mean unnatural? If a man caused or person caused
>>Yes, they're caused by, yes, that's correct
>>There's a road so that needs to be
>>Because the road is there, that is the explanation for it, as opposed to it just happened accidentally. Thank you for correcting that. Here is a bleak photograph taken from an airplane by Matt Hanson in the Congo and the area in the center, right here, that you see, this little triangular area, is an area where the forest vegetation has been cut down and burned and this darker area is then the burn scar from the fire. Now if you're gonna use satellites to study fire, it's important to do this the right time of day because fires occur when it is hotter and when the relative humidity is lower and that generally occurs just after solar noon and this can be seen by using data from the tropical rainfall monitoring mission satellite, which goes over at all different times because it's in an equatorial orbit and so you get data at different times. You can combine these data and then look at the fire counts and see how they fall. At the bottom are two graphs of those data, with respect to the local hour, the local time and you see they both tend to peak just after 2:00 local time and that's when, once again, it's the hottest and also the driest in terms of relative humidity. If you're talking about fires you can have different degrees of severity, which can range on the left from a very, very severe fire, in the center you'll have some damage of the standing trees and then on the far right you have a fire which has come through and has cleared out the very small trees, small bushes and herbaceous vegetation. So even though you have a fire, it could be an extremely severe fire or it could be a very mild fire. There are other impacts which are important, one after you have fires, if you have a severe fire, this can have serious impacts on soil and principally on soil erosion and water runoff because the vegetation has been killed and that is what stabilizes many soils in many areas where you have steeper slopes. So therefore it's extremely important to study this and then to identify where you have fires and determine what the severity of the fire is, superimpose that upon additional elevation model and determine where you might have serious erosion problems with subsequent problems for water quality. Now recently as more of us move into areas which we like to live in in forests or in wilder areas, there is what is called the wild land urban interface. So as people move into these areas and then a fire comes through, unfortunately if they don't have a huge fire zone around their house or structures, they can be burned. And this is a real problem. And this is a growing problem in the western US where fire is much more prevalent than it is in the eastern US. Now sometimes you can have fires which cause unforeseen problems. There's this fire in South Africa two years ago which actually destroyed part of their power grid and caused a massive power problem because it destroyed their power transmission lines. You know where these things are, if you monitor fires you can get some idea to sort of minimize problems. Now at the University of Maryland three years ago some students, after a big basketball victory's or defeats, they behave in a very silly way and for some reason they like to destroy furniture by fire. And they built a huge fire of couches on route 1 and they melted the principle fiber optics cable to the University of Maryland and also destroyed several high power lines. Fortunately the police were there with their surveillance cameras and were able to identify the perpetrators and punish them. That is just one example. Sometimes you'll have fires, that's sort of a funny example, but this is one which happened naturally and where fires occur and where infrastructure is located, these are very important considerations to mitigate damage. Now something also which is quite curious, as we have more invasive species, cheat grass is a very good example of this. This is an invasive species which means it's not natural to North America, it was introduced. And it is very efficient at competing against other natural vegetation and it's herbaceous and so it grows. And when a fire comes along it causes a very severe and more serious fire. So there can be strong interactions between evasive species and wildfires, as is the case with cheat grass. So now let's go on to some examples of recent fires and for this I'm drawing upon some work of my co-workers Chris Justice, Stephania Coanise [phonetic] both from University of Maryland and Amelio Shuviecho [phonetic] from University of Alcala in Spain. And this will deal with fire in Mediterranean biomes like we have in California, like we have in the Mediterranean area and in particular I'll show some examples of the recent fires in Greece. Now first, what is it about the Mediterranean biome that's so interesting to all of us who study fires with satellite data? Well in the Mediterranean biome, fire is a very important aspect of the ecology. This is why we have serious wildfire problems in California cause that is a Mediterranean ecological system. And the reason for that is in Mediterranean systems you have winter rains and you have a prolonged summer dry season. So it's hot and you have a lot of rain in the winter and so you have a lot of bushes, a lot of trees, a lot of herbaceous vegetation and then they burn when it's dry, frequently. [background noise] So at the bottom of this there is a plot of the temperature and the rainfall and the relative humidity from Maiorca, a place we would all like to be anytime of the year, even during the dry season. On the far right is the same from San Francisco. These are both examples of Mediterranean systems. Now I'll go through this briefly, in these Mediterranean areas we have a lot of shrubs and they burn. It's called chaparral in California, if you want to think of an example of that. It has different names in different European companies but you have scattered trees and you have a lot of brushy vegetation and it gets very, very dry during the summer months. Here are some examples taken in the Mediterranean portion of France and you see once again scattered trees, a lot of shrubs, scattered herbaceous vegetation, this gets very, very dry and then burns. You would expect something very similar in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and all around on the northern boundary of Africa, as you move through Algeria and where you have wetter conditions. You have something very similar in Turkey where I've worked extensively. Okay so now let's look, here this has information about the chaparral of California. And these plants in the chaparral in California are very susceptible to burning. They have very volatile oils. It's dry and they really burn if they catch on fire and here is a photograph of these from California. So once again, in California we have a Mediterranean ecological and climatic system, at least from the Sierra Nevada's to the coast. Where do we have Mediterranean vegetation? Well we see that we have about 10 percent of it is in California but then most of it is in the Mediterranean basin, which you could expect from its name but there's also some in Chile, there's also some in South Africa. Now there's a low impact of fire in Mediterranean systems in a sense of the total trace gas emissions because you're not burning a lot of big trees. But it has a very high frequency and it's very regular with respect to the time of year in which it occurs. It always occurs in the summer or in the early fall and it also tends to have a very big effect, as we'll see from the recent fires in Greece, on ecological resources and also on humans. Now here are some data of Emilio Shuviecho from Spain, from 1988 to 1999, showing all the fires. There were a total of 210,000 fires, that's a lot of fires and what their causes were due to. And if you look at the natural causes about four percent. We don't know what caused them maybe a quarter of the time but a very large percentage of these fires were related to either the carelessness of humans or some intentional fire setting.
>>What's the difference between your other causes and human causes?
>>These are not my data, [laughter] I wondered the same thing. I would revise this myself because it's ambiguous, isn't it? But other causes, well it could be volcanoes. It could be maybe raccoons chewing through a power cable starting a fire. [laughter] I mean any sort of unusual
>>What are the differences between intentional and human?
>>Well you could [inaudible audience comment] now yes obviously if you sum up all the percentages they far exceed 100 percent. There are certain situations where you want to actually set a fire and have a prescribed fire so that would be intentional, say for sugarcane for example or whatever you'd be growing and wanted to get rid of the agricultural residue. So sorry, I'll have to try and be sessile. [laughter] Yes there is some ambiguity in this. That's the problem when you try and use other people's tables but these are all good points. Okay so in Greece we saw recently that it was the human set fires, largely arson, which were extremely important for most of the damage which was done and I'll focus on that in a second and it's a paradox that as the standard of living increases in these areas, you have more population pressure, you have more people there, you have more people smoking throwing cigarettes and you have more people who set fires. Because in Greece, at least, forest is a national resource and it's only if it's burned does this offer the opportunity, then it can be encroached upon and actually have private ownership. So that is definitely a law that when I take over my highly centralized democracy in Greece, that I will change. [laughter] And that's what other people are saying too. Okay so, but the majority of the human cause or [inaudible] fires are linked to agriculture and forestry activities. Okay this is just a figure I think I'll go over but it just shows as the population in coastal areas has increased, so has the incidence of fire and that's what we observe. Now the question is asked, what about global warming? If we have increased surface temperatures will this exacerbate fire? It very definitely will, in broil systems, in fact all systems, because it then results in drier conditions at some time. And so in Mediterranean systems this will clearly be the case. If we have warmer temperatures, this will make fires more severe. Okay, so what are some other causes of fires? Well now we come back to some of the details on the table which I didn't explain very well, smoking, we all want to stop smoking for health reasons and for fires, two good causes to further our campaign against smoking. And then sometimes when you have conflicts fires will be set, so on and so forth, including institutional failures. And then you also have the situation, which has happened several times in the US, that unemployed people will set fires to be employed as a firefighter to put them out. And sometimes this just gets away from them and that causes serious problems. So there are all these things that are bundled together. So now let's look at some of the recent fires in Greece. And here is a recent photograph from Greece showing the encroachment of these very serious fires. Just about two percent of Greece burned this past August and this was the largest, as you'll see, that's ever happened there, the largest extent of fires. You also have a very high mortality on animals and habitat. At the same time though some degree of burning is important to sort of maximize a biological diversity because fire has always been a part of natural systems. So here are some, here is a summary of some of the facts from the recent fires in Greece that unfortunately 66 people lost their lives directly from the fires. There were estimated economic loss between one and two billion dollars and then it caused traffic accidents, airports were closed. I was in Turkey at the time and several people trying to fly into Greece came to Turkey instead. And then there're the health impacts. If you've ever been in an area where there're a lot of fires, I've been in Amazonia a lot where there's a lot of burning during the dry part of the year and you smell like smoke, it's the same thing as being in the car with some really heavy smokers and you're the only one who doesn't smoke. So there's some very definite health impacts from being in the area where you have all the smoke. Okay let's show some examples, these are some pictures which Stephania took or collected in Greece where you had about two percent of the country burned and some very, very serious consequences of this. And so you see people fighting fires, you see aircraft dropping fire retardants and then you see the consequence after the fires come through. And fires have come through and destroyed structures and altered people's livelihood as well as killing 66 people. Now if you have information where the fires are, which direction they're moving, this can be extremely important to get people out of harm's way. And that is one of the use of using satellites and it will also show how the data are actually used in a technical context from aircraft to look at this in a more immediate way because the satellite isn't always there. But there is this need to have good information about fires, what they're doing in terms of their movements because of evacuation. Satellites, satellites are extremely useful for looking at the extent of fires and for where they're occurring and this is sort of the first phase of a monitoring program, after which you get these data within a few minutes by acquisition by the satellite. These data are then transmitted to local authorities who then can investigate with aircraft, or what other resources they have, in the areas identified precisely by the satellite. So here on the left hand side of this image you have a true color image of Greece and then where you have fires, you have these red indications and you also see the smoke blue from the fires. And then three days later you look at the same area after all the haze is gone and you can actually see where the burned areas were. So this is a confirmation of the actual areas which were burned by the fire. The burned area is a very good representation of how severe the fire was. Now how different were the 2007 fires in Greece than the other years? Well you see they didn't go off scale but you had a six to seven fold increase in the number of fires in Greece this year as opposed to the time period from 2003 through 2006, which would be comparable in terms of the population pressures and other factors. And so it was a very, very big event. The burned area of Greece was about two percent of the entire national surface area. That's very, very high. It's represented here and you actually see the burned areas when they burned and most of the burning occurred in August of this year. Now we also have a lot of fires in California because it is also a Mediterranean ecosystem and here is an example of the Zaca wild fire which burned in July and August in the Las Padres National Forest and it was only after it had been burning for almost two months that it was extinguished. Sometimes fires burn in very isolated areas and it's extremely difficult to get in and actually put them out. They'll be burning in a few areas and then the wind will come along and off they go again. Okay so now I'm at the point where we're going to talk about what can we do to actually mitigate damage from fires? Well we have various resources we can use such as satellites to actually determine where the fires are burning. Now you don't have tactical information from satellites because they simply pass over and they usually look in a fairly course way. They can identify where the fire is but you don't have information about the extended fire. But you can transmit this information to the forest service, as we see on the lower right hand side, and then they can activate their resources which are aircraft or people on the ground to go out and investigate, and then if things look very serious they can then mobilize their resources for fire fighting, getting people out of harm's way and then bringing in fire crews to put out the fire. But the first or the trip wire for all this are the satellite observations, especially if you're dealing with large areas where there aren't many people. If there are people there, of course they would recognize the fire as having a curve, would have a good idea of what its extent was. Now one of the things which NASA and the University of Maryland have is the Modus instrument. This is the work of Chris Justice, who's one of my coworkers, that every day the fire data are updated and so you can look and see where in the world we have fires. In the US these data are transmitted immediately to the forest service and the same occurs in other countries. So this is the first level of identification and monitoring. Now when the forest service gets these data they then activate their system which includes an airplane like we see in the upper left or in the middle left of this photograph, which has thermal infrared sensing equipment on it where you can actually fly over a fire and get a very detailed map and you can fly around and around and around and come back in a few hours and do this periodically because you have identified where the fire is and then you can look at it in more detail. So the image on the right is an image where the fire is actively burning, which is represented by the red colors and this is extremely important to identify for fire control and also for the mitigation of damage and also alerting people to get out of the way. Now people are talking about doing different types of things to do this and do it more efficiently and cheaper and one of the things being proposed is to use something similar to what our military is using now and that are these unmanned aerial drones which have instruments which can fly around and they're robotic. So this is a forth coming peaceful use of this technology. You're not trying to sort of target things or do other things but you're simply trying to minimize the damage from fire and do so at a cost effective way. So if a fire was identified then you could fly one of these things around and it could loiter for several hours, which is extremely important when the control activities are under way. Okay in summary, what I've tried to do in my presentation is to show how we have different layers of information, we have people on the ground of course but in areas where there aren't many people, it's extremely important to have satellite data then coupled with aircraft data or these unmanned aerial vehicles to investigate where the fires are burning so we can mitigate their damage and we can also mobilize control activities. So control activities can be directed to the most serious part of the fire based upon objective data and not what people say well there's a huge fire here. Get over here quick. We would all tend to exaggerate because we would lack the perspective to view the whole fire in its totality. This is a good example of the use of satellite data and aircraft data for very cost effective purposes. It also saves human life and it also minimizes damage to structures and to natural ecosystems. [applause]